THE FORENSIC EMPIRE OF ELIOT HIGGINS

As fakes and deceptions proliferate at record speeds, one guy has maintained a miraculous nose for the truth-the founder of Bellingcat, the world's biggest citizen-run intelligence agency.

- SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN

TEN YEARS AGO, ELIOT HIGGINS could eat room service meals at a hotel without fear of being poisoned. He hadn't yet been declared a foreign agent by Russia; in fact, he wasn't even a blip on the radar of security agencies in that country or anywhere else. He was just a British guy with an unfulfilling admin job who'd been blogging under the pen name Brown Moses-after a Frank Zappa song-and was in the process of turning his blog into a full-fledged website. He was an open source intelligence analyst avant la lettre, poring over social media photos and videos and other online jetsam to investigate wartime atrocities in Libya and Syria.

In its disorganized way, the internet supplied him with so much evidence that he was beating UN investigators to their conclusions. So he figured he'd go pro. He called his website Bellingcat, after the fable of the mice that hit on a way to tell when their predator was approaching. He would be the mouse that belled the cat.

Today, Bellingcat is the world's foremost open source intelligence agency.

From his home in the UK, Higgins oversees a staff of nearly 40 employees who have used an evolving set of online forensic techniques to investigate everything from the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine to a 2020 dognapping to the various plots to kill Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Bellingcat operates as an NGO headquartered in the Netherlands but is in demand everywhere: Its staffers train newsrooms and conduct workshops; they unearth war crimes; their forensic evidence is increasingly part of court trials. When I met Higgins one Saturday in April, in a pub near his house, he'd just been to the Netherlands to collect an award honoring Bellingcat's contributions to free speech-and was soon headed back to collect another, for peace and human rights.